Traditionalist Youth Network
I haven’t actually taken the time to read Harold Covington’s critically-acclaimed series of White Nationalist action/adventure novels, so I had no idea what a “DM” was. According to Mr. Lewis, I’m a “drooling moron”. I’m also an adherent of Madame Blavatsky, a neo-nazi kook, a fascist, a neo-nazi-fascist, anti-Jewish, what I claim to hate, stupid, a liar, deaf, anti-social, stupid, a hypocrite, and most damning…formulaic. With so much buckshot fired in my general direction, I’m sure I’m guilty to varying degrees of some of these charges, but I object to being formulaic.
After leaving nothing but a charred spot on the ground where I had stood, he turned the label gun on himself for his closing remarks,
In conclusion I could be accused of irreverence, bellicosity, meanness, and misconstruing Matt Parrott, CC and Race-Realism. This might all be true, but this is nothing less than Matt Parrott’s SOP (Standard Operating Procedure). He takes all the leftwing crap and regurgitates it like a good Marxist drone when he is criticizing Christians, but whines when the left returns the favor on race.
My critique of Young Earth Creationism is indeed partially commensurate with the Leftists’ critiques of it. Sometimes Commies are correct. I have no compunction against plucking rhetorical appetizers from the left wing of the ideological cafeteria when it suits me. Chomsky’s critique of cannibal capitalism is great, and I quote him when appropriate. Even Marx had his share of accurate statements and conclusions, and many of his prophecies relating to capitalism becoming more destructive and alienating have come to fruition.
There are no such things as “their facts” and “our facts”, a truism which is commonly lost on rigid ideologues whose eagerness and loyalty to their factions surpass their critical thinking skills. I am not leaning on popular opinion or institutional legitimacy in my arguments against Ken Ham. My arguments do happen to have those in this case, but I believe the weight of my writing over the past decade confirms that I do not have a Standard Operating Procedure of leaning on popular fads when it suits me. Besides, I published my essay at Counter-Currents, a venue where neither the editors, the contributors, nor the readers put any weight in this regime or its pronouncements.
Creationism
Mr. Lewis accused me of “criticizing Christians” when I’ve done nothing of the sort. I criticized a particular line of thinking and arguing which some Christians have been engaging in, “Young Earth Creationism”. I’m a Christian, and my work is for Christ. If a group of Christians are doing something which is misguided and self-destructive, then it’s necessary and appropriate to correct them. They’re doing Christianity a disservice when they insist that the Christian faith is incompatible with established science. Having been a teenage atheist who rejected Christianity for nearly a decade precisely because I presumed that Christianity required choosing between it and my passion for anthropological research, I’m not budging.
True to form, he perceives my disagreement with his exegesis and concomitant sham science as an objection to Christianity itself. He insists, incorrectly, that scientific research relating to the Big Bang demonstrates that science has indeed crossed the metaphysical chasm, attempting to explain the ultimate origins. Science categorically cannot do that. Contrary to popular belief, “The Big Bang Theory” doesn’t even ask or answer the ultimate question of how existence either emerged from a true philosophical vacuum or is perhaps infinite.
“What existed before the Big Bang?”
“Where did the laws of physics which led to the Big Bang come from?”
“Why?”
Crickets.
Ultimately, Mr. Lewis is a philosopher by trade whose interest in science is evidently limited to cramming his philosophical and religious conclusions into it. Science doesn’t presume that God doesn’t exist, science is indifferent to His existence. It’s a process, a method, a tool. It can’t ask or answer whether God exists any more than a hammer can turn a screw. Hypothetically, God could prove himself by the scientific method’s rules, perhaps by placing some golden tablets confirming his existence in Bill Nye’s hat. Given that His sacred texts repeatedly emphasize the importance of cultivating faith in Him, and how predictable and amenable to scientific investigation His creation has proven to be, that seems an unlikely prospect.
Mr. Lewis is correct in noting that belief in God would lead to that being possible. My mistake. Unlikely, in my estimation. But certainly possible.
Science is about measuring and observing, then crafting hypotheses from these measurements and observations which can be tested with further measurement and observation. Mr. Lewis and the rest of the Answers in Genesis crowd would like to make a distinction between contemporary and “historical” science which can’t actually be observed. This relies on an intuitive but false reliance on our primary senses. After all, we can’t actually ride a dinosaur, sliding our hands through their feathers (or across their scales) as we gallop along the Jurassic landscape, “seeing it for ourselves”.
Contemporary science doesn’t work that way, either. Few of us (eight, to be precise) have actually pranced along the surface of the moon. Nuclear physics are pretty much entirely divorced from firsthand observation right up until the light switch works…or the blast wave jerks. An instrument which measures something to a certain degree of precision measures something to a certain degree of precision whether it’s measuring the oxygen level in the room you’re standing in or the oxygen level in the Carboniferous Period. Distant time limits accuracy, of course, but it’s a clinal rather than cladistic concern. Calling it a different kind of science altogether is a Creationist trope.
Race Realism
Speaking of different kinds of science, there is an important distinction between actual science and popular science. In actual science, medications, treatments, and prognoses are commonly tailored to a person’s biological race. In popular science, race is a vaporous social construct. The parallax is striking, and mainstream psychometricians are very careful to speak very guardedly and in obfuscated lexicon when confirming that different human population groups consistently exhibit different average brain sizes and intelligence quotients. While science is necessarily (and appropriately) silent on the policy conclusions to draw from its data, Todd Lewis betrays his ignorance of scientific research by presuming that stark racial differences are only supported by a handful of Esoteric Hitlerist “kooks”.
In a baffling bit of pseudo-intellectual effrontery, he declares that our Race Realism originated with Madame Blavatsky’s esoteric cult. How do I respond to this silly proposition, befitting an unexceptional teenager who’s sat through one too many History Channel specials? Until we produce a sensationalist History Channel documentary or populist Racialism Museum with an attractive gift shop and food court, Mr. Lewis will likely remain “skeptical”. For the curious reader, Libertarian Realist has a nice collection of sources on the topic here: Race Realism: A Primer.
Well over a century before Madame Blavatsky’s silly sideshow shtick, President Thomas Jefferson gathered a great deal of elementary research and observations on racial differences in his Notes on Virginia, research and observations which have largely been confirmed and corroborated by methodologically superior and more precise examinations since then. The Nobel laureate who discovered DNA directly declared, regarding Blacks, that ”all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really.” The inventor of the transistor, the very founder of Silicon Valley himself, dedicated his years after winning the Nobel Prize to challenging the taboo against race realism.
If “race realism” is a pseudo-science, then ours is unique among pseudo-sciences in having accumulated more Nobel Laureates, esteemed researchers, and quality peer-reviewed original research than all of the other pseudo-sciences combined. Not a single standardized test has been composed which shows racial parity in intelligence. Todd Lewis is welcome to sketch a test up in Adobe Acrobat and collaborate with a local college to administer it. If I’m really as kooky as Lewis insists, producing one single peer-reviewed and replicable would be super easy. Finding an example of somebody else on God’s green earth having done so would be even easier.
Finally, he insists that he’s on an Internet where race realist ideas are given a fair hearing and then crushed by the weight of quality egalitarian research disproving racial differences. On the Internet my computer’s connected to, comment sections of mainstream media outlets are jealously guarded by moderators who steadily work to filter out our increasingly popular position. Our blogs and outlets are growing larger year over year, with active and growing Internet communities as more and more people explore the facts and join us in our conclusions. Meanwhile, the “anti-racist” (read: anti-White) outlets necessarily have their comments on moderation, not that there’s much of a community to moderate.
It’s not just me. Mainstream voices in media and academia are claiming that the Internet is a “hotbed of hate” where “hate groups are on the march” and so forth. Even farther out on the limb, in the application of identitarian ideas to public policy, Mr. Lewis’s position is on the defensive. The Swiss just passed a major border control law. John Boehner solidified the GOP’s retreat from amnesty last week. Europe’s nationalist parties are rapidly gaining strength and the gatekeepers of acceptable opinion are panicking.
Anarchism and the New Right
The site, Attack the System, is an anarchist collective, under the aegis of Editor-in-Chief Keith Preston. While Preston’s neither a Christian nor a White Nationalist, his particular flavor of anarchism and open-minded disposition leaves him tolerant of Christian and race realist positions which the self-styled paragons of “Tolerance” would never tolerate. His “anarchism” deserves a separate term to distinguish itself from the Marxist farce which has effectively usurped the label.
According to Preston’s conception of anarchy, a global patchwork of relatively small organic collectives would emerge, typically around ethnic identity, religious affiliation, and culture. You know, …the kind of stuff people actually gravitate toward when a powerful state doesn’t preclude their doing so with its network of incentives and disincentives. I’ve joked about it, but there’s some truth to my claim that his “anarchist” label and my “fascist” label largely boil down to semantic quibbles over defining the “state”. I also joke, and there’s also some truth to my claim that I’m a “Situational Anarchist”. I’m as opposed to this state as he is, and much more so (in both theory and practice) than most self-styled “anarchists”.
I appreciate Todd Lewis taking the time to kick off the debate between divergent factions of the New Right (or Dark Enlightenment or Dissident Right or whatever). If I do happen to be drooling, it’s because I’m salivating at the prospect of a constructive dialogue with a fellow Christian political dissident. I’m not, as he imagines, an evil racial supremacist hellbent on whipping up a totalitarian regime of some sort. I’ll happily debate him to the hilt on any relevant political topic he prefers. If I’m wrong, I’ll gladly concede. If he catches an error of mine, I’ll gladly correct myself (as I did once above).